The 20 best books of the decade

What are the books that can be said to have defined the first decade of the
millennium? Here, Michael Prodger assesses the literature that shaped our
reading habits of the past 10 years, produced new genres, created
controversy, and entertained us, and then there are the books that, quite
simply, would be hailed as great in any era
.

Nearly all of the Obama's earnings last year came from the president's two best-sellers

When the enterprising publisher bought this memoir, President Obama was merely Senator Obama and there were few indications of what was to come. In recounting the story of his upbringing, Obama shows that his “Yes we can” mantra was not merely an aspirational soundbite but based firmly on his own experiences as a mixed-race American. The book was a key part of his mission statement about decency and optimism and helped to win him the goodwill of much of the world. As well as defining a moment in time, it also proved that Obama can write as winningly as he talks. Would it sell as well a year into his presidency?

Related Articles

A big book in size, theme and ambitions, The Corrections put Jonathan Franzen in the vanguard of America’s bright young novelists. A simple core – a mother’s attempts to reunite her disparate children for a family Christmas – burgeons into a story about the complexities wrought on the American dream by pharmaceuticals, sexuality and shyster capitalism. Through the Lambert family Franzen conjures up a modern Everyman with ordinary lives teetering on the edge of bathos, tragedy or triumph. Proof that the Great American Novel (see Philip Roth, above right) is still worth aiming for.

A Dickensian story with a pink twist. With all the elements of a penny dreadful – orphans, double-crossing, madness and pornography – this Victorian tale could have sunk to the level of picaresque pastiche, but while much ink has been spilled on Waters’s lesbian characters it is her ability to summon up the past in palpable, brooding detail that is her most striking characteristic. This is a novel that seems easy to categorise but doesn’t fit into any obvious genre.

A high-end piece of true crime writing, The Suspicions encompasses far more than just the story of a murder. Mr Whicher was a celebrated Victorian detective, and the crime that got his senses twitching was the vicious and motiveless slaughter of a young child in a quiet Wiltshire village in 1860. The case itself induced both moral panic and universal fascination in the country at large. Kate Summerscale’s investigation unravels not just the details of the murder and its investigation but also the birth of the modern detective and the influence of the proceedings on writers such as Wilkie Collins and Dickens. This is documentary writing of rare quality and intelligence.

White Teeth put multiculturalism on the literary map and made it fashionable to boot. Smith’s tale of three North London families – white, Indian and mixed – didn’t just show a slice of modern life but did it with wit and panache. The book is full of big themes, too, not least race, gender and class, but the potential for hectoring is deftly avoided, the messages being more subtly conveyed through vivid characters and sharp dialogue.

The first major book of the decade is a true Great American Novel. The Human Stain was the culmination of an extraordinary period of fecundity in Philip Roth’s long career. At 65, an age at which many novelists have said their piece, he started American Pastoral, the first part of a trilogy (with I Married a Communist and concluding with The Human Stain) that examines just how far the politics, social changes and political correctness of post-war America have eroded the promised land of his youth. The books – and in particular this last volume – powered by Roth’s autograph mixture of rage, sex and moral indignation, amount to one of the great achievements of American letters.

The Human Stain is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter ego, and deals with both racial and sexual politics and how they lay low Coleman Silk, a professor of classics at a Massachusetts college. First a piece of casual slang leads to him being forced from his job and then he starts an affair with one of the college janitors nearly 40 years his junior. And at the centre of the book is a plot twist that turns everything on its head.

The film version of The Human Stain, starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman, is not to be recommended. The book cannot be recommended highly enough.

While the French may be besotted with them, graphic novels – apart from those by cult practitioners such as Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco – have never had much credibility on these shores. Marjane Satrapi’s two-part memoir changed that. In simple, bold, black-and-white drawings she tells the story of her childhood as the daughter of two well-meaning Marxists in revolutionary Iran. Through her six-year-old eyes and later as a student she recounts the experience of both the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq and she does so with both seriousness and charm. Like Khaled Hosseini, Satrapi shows a country by which the West is transfixed from an unusual angle. It was the combination of this powerful background, the striking graphics and a touching innocence that stopped Persepolis from being mawkish and made it into affecting personalised history.

This was Peter Carey’s second Man Booker winner (his first was Oscar and Lucinda in 1988) and is a retelling of one of Australia’s great foundation myths. The story takes the form of a journal written by Ned Kelly to his as-yet-unborn daughter, and describes the hard scrabble outback life and frequent conflicts with authority that turned him from a mere larrikin of Irish stock into the Robin Hood of the Antipodes. The novel’s power comes from its unromanticised portrayal of Australia and the plausibly rough and flawed figure of Kelly himself. Most notable though is Carey’s employment of a distinctive vernacular prose style (based on the one surviving letter written by Kelly himself) that uses only rudimentary grammar and no commas. While it makes the book a frequently uncomfortable story to read, it does gives it a memorable and appropriate grittiness.

The book that catapulted Ian McEwan out of his high-literary sphere to a new level of general acclaim. A seemingly straightforward tale of cross-class love and blundering miscomprehension in pre- and wartime Britain turns out to be not a piece of engaging and immaculate pastiche but a story about writing. It is a trick that could undermine the novel but McEwan’s brilliance with set-pieces – a sweltering country-house summer, carnage at Dunkirk, an hermetic love affair – wrap the reader so tightly in the story that the tricksiness comes as revelation rather than irritation, and the fact that McEwan has proved to be a manipulator of the highest order is forgiven. He may have won the Booker with Amsterdam but this is a better book by far.

The Laconic McCarthy, the icon of Southern gothic, is frequently likened to William Faulkner and hailed as one of the great contemporary American novelists. Public recognition, however, did not arrive until the early 1990s with All the Pretty Horses. No Country for Old Men (the title comes from Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium) keeps the Western setting of his early books but the story is set in the modern age. The plot involves a drugs deal gone wrong, a man who finds a case full of dollars, a hitman and a sheriff, and mixes violence with pared down descriptions of the sun-blasted American-Mexican border. At heart a simple thriller, the menace is made tangible through the person of the icily deranged hitman, Anton Chigurh.

A book about commas and semicolons made perhaps the most unlikely best-seller of the decade. With this manual of grammar, Lynne Truss, formerly a droll journalist, emerged as the champion of proper punctuation and thus gladdened the hearts of the millions who bemoan the slackness apparent in contemporary English usage and the negative effects of email and text-speak. Their reason for gratitude was two-fold: through its anecdotes and gentle humour it laid out the case for punctuation, but it also saved purists from the charge of pedantry.

The previously unknown Canadian’s whimsical yarn was the unexpected Man Booker winner in 2002. The story of a young boy shipwrecked on a lifeboat for 227 days with only animals – in particular a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker – for company, combined elements of fairy tale, fable and allegory. While the imagination on display is unarguable what it all adds up to is less clear – and for many beside the point. Allegations of plagiarism from a Brazilian novelist did little to dampen the book’s popular success.

The book that turned Prof Dawkins from respected genetic biologist into the God-worrier in chief. His contention that creation has nothing to do with God and everything to do with evolution has made him the rallying point and spokesman for atheists who can be as noisy in their proselytism as their religious opponents. “There’s probably no God,” he curiously claims, but this book definitely made militant atheism a pressing public topic.

A collection of both new and previously unpublished pieces, this book amounts to the quintessential Bennett. It is at its most affecting when describing his family, notably his parents’ marriage and a strain of mental illness that was never discussed at home. It also includes revealing pieces about his own sexuality and private life. These are leavened by diary entries and accounts of childhood trips and adult musings all related with the gentle humour that he has made such an effective tool for wrapping around emotion. The words on the page are like hearing Bennett read them to you.

Gladwell is the corkscrew-haired Canadian who has forged a new genre out of studying the little-regarded consequences of various sociological phenomena, from teen smoking to fads for certain types of footwear. The tipping point of his title is the “levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable” and the book itself is an examination of what establishes those levels. This left-field thinking has made Gladwell the Edward de Bono de nos jours, though some might argue that the granting of a $1.5?million advance was the book’s own tipping point for success.

Bill Bryson used to be the cuddly American whose love of Britain endeared us both to him and to our own country. This book used that popularity to striking effect. The perfect primer for an increasing non-specialist age, it explains in layman’s terms some of the big subjects and personalities of science. Bryson has been admirably candid about his motivation: he knew little about science himself and his teachers had failed to excite him in the subject. His broad-sweep survey, taking in everything from the Big Bang to evolution and from Isaac Newton to earthquakes, is a noble attempt to fill a black hole in the school curriculum.

The son of a committed Nazi, Sebald moved to England in 1970. His life was cut short by his death in a car crash aged 57, but by then he had already established a new and deeply personal style of writing that is concerned largely with the theme of memory and in particular his struggle to understand the history of Germany and the Second World War. His favoured format was a mixture of fiction and fact interspersed with evocative photography. The career of Jacques Austerlitz, the eponymous hero, encompasses many elements of Sebald’s own history, and his travels tell not just the story of the Holocaust but of the lost world of old Europe.

The novel that should have won the Man Booker Prize in 2005, Never Let Me Go is nominally a science-fiction story. It describes the childhoods of a group of young people cloned, although they are not fully aware of it, to provide donor organs. A writer who shuns the overblown, Ishiguro’s gradual building up of the full import of their fate is hauntingly done. A masterpiece of incremental detail that becomes poignant as well as horrific, the novel includes elements of both boarding-school stories and superior sci-fi such as John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos. Ishiguro’s habitual feeling for ill-defined menace is used here to powerful effect.

The Kite Runner has sold some 12 million copies, and Hosseini’s follow-up is another lush and unashamedly emotive tale of hardship and the Taliban. This story of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, has been hailed as an insight into the reality of Afghanistan. The plot itself is an old-fashioned heartstring-plucker and the writing is often hackneyed but the context gives the novel the appearance of capturing historical reality.

Susie Salmon is a most unusual narrator – she has been raped, murdered, dismembered and is now in heaven looking down on the family she left behind and the man who killed her. Perhaps the reason for the novel’s success is that it is not a tale of retribution but rather an unusual coming-of-age story. Susie may be dead but she continues to grow up, using the living as the markers in her own development. Some critics, however, refused to be beguiled, criticising Susie’s God-free heaven. Alice Sebold based the story on elements from her own past – she was raped as a university student.

For more books of the decade, or to buy the above books visitWaterstones